Posts Tagged ‘Mindfulness’

I teach listening and value empathy. A lot. As Carl Rogers says, “[Empathy] just feels damn good.” (If you need a primer on empathy, here is a video that makes it fun and easy to learn about.) I want every human to experience as much good listening and empathy as possible because it is the…

“I’ve met the greatest girl,” John said. He was beaming. “She’s really hot. She’s 27, super smart. This weekend I’m chartering a yacht for us! Isn’t that awesome?” I just looked at him. This was his third “greatest girl” in six months. Each was 20-plus years younger than him—and all three were following quickly on…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about men. Not just the out-of-work, “forgotten”, rust belt men who voted for Donald Trump, but also about the smart, progressive 18-year-old son of a friend of mine, who confides in his mother that it’s hard to hear so much about how much white men have screwed everything up. I’m angry…

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? Or are you cringing? The holidays are upon us and along with the shopping, singing carols, and drinking eggnog often come feelings of loneliness and grief. For many people the holiday season is fraught with anxiety, frustration and sadness. I see many in my practice who dread December as…

It’s only been two weeks, y’all. For me, at this point, the intensity of my own outrage is in conflict with my rationalization that we’re in a very long game. To be honest, it’s draining. Even though I’m talking about the Trumpocalypse (and yes, assuming that most readers here share my political leanings), “outrage” may…

When I was a younger adult, I had a scathing inner critic. It caused me all kinds of problems, which I handled in various maladaptive (read self-destructive) ways. That harsh internal voice mostly riddled me with anxiety which was so uncomfortable I looked for different ways to avoid feeling it–like partying, often with people I…

Chances are you’ve heard about this magical thing called self-love and have been trying to get some. Self-love is supposed to give us all good stuff: the confidence to set boundaries at work, the motivation to find our life’s purpose, the ability to feel fulfilled and happy alone, and the guts to give our Mr.…

Mindfulness has become all the rage of late, particularly within the helping and healing professions. Since it was introduced by Jon Kabbat-Zin as a means for managing stress and anxiety almost 20 years ago, mindfulness has become a go-to modality for anything from acute traumatic stress to depression. Even the monolithic Psychotherapy Networker ran a…

One of the most persistent themes in psychotherapy for the last 50 years has been a focus on the present moment. Starting with Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy in the ‘60’s we seem to have been working on trying to help our clients to articulate what was going on emotionally and physically in the moment…

Joy is an inherent part of our basic nature. We all have it, but many of us have lost touch with it over the years. We formed identities in response to what was happening around us and forgot the truth of who we were. How can we get back in touch with our joyful selves?…

While in graduate school for Transpersonal Counseling Psychology at Naropa University, I was lucky to meet a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who taught his students the way his teacher taught him, and so forth, back as many generations as we could fathom. Over the ten plus years of studying and practicing with him, I began to…

Money is ubiquitous, and it’s also something we rarely talk about. Yet who hasn’t struggled with money in some way? Whether it is not having enough, having enough and then not, or struggling and then having more than enough, money plays an important role in our lives. But it also effects our emotional well being. While…

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